Performance Indicators in Higher Education

Governments in many parts of the world have become increasingly determined to make higher education more accountable to the taxpayer. In the UK, the government intends to make the funding of universities relate more directly to their performance. It is the purpose of this book to examine the possibility of constructing performance indicators for UK universities. The authors aim to compare the performance of entire institutions, using a range of variables which are potentially useful performance indicators for policy makers and university administrators. These include cost per student, non-completion rates, degree results, the employability of newly-qualified graduates and the research rating of each university. Information for all these variables is provided for all UK universities. In most cases, the information is provided for several years so that recent trends can be evaluated. However, for inter-university comparisons to be of value, it is necessary to allow for inter-university differences in the inputs used by each institution. Universities are therefore treated as production units which use inputs to produce outputs.
The underlying aim is to compare each university's actual outputs with those it could have been expected to produce given the inputs available to it.